posted
This is a premature thread, but I will be leaving to go see the first showing of Serenity in nought but 10 minutes.
The plan: Grab a Steak and Shake Burger. Sneak it into the theater under my jacket. Enjoy the burger while the pointless previews play. Sit in stunned fanboy amazement as the movie plays.
posted
Hmmm... well, I liked it. I've just got a few thoughts off the top of my head.
1) The Retcon of River's escape: The small bit of backstory from the series holds up pretty well, Simon just never mentioned that he had anything to do with springing her. River seemed awfully lucid during the escape though. And waltzing into an Alliance facility seems an awfully hero-type thing to do for our meek and mild, all-dolled-up Dr. Tam.
2) Kaylee's lost weight. Hell, EVERYONE'S lost weight. Book's skin and bones, Inara's thinner, even Wash looked thinner.
3) Vibrators still exist in the 'Verse. Outstanding.
4) I felt a disconnect between the movie and the series. It never got quite to the family feeling there was on the show. The interactions were a bit different. The absence and reappearance of Inara and Book felt just a touch empty. And Wash's death wasn't deep enough. For awhile, it looked like they were going to kill off everyone. River got grabbed, Kaylee got tranqed, Simon got shot, Zoe got sliced.
5) The explanation about the Reavers made sense.
All in all, I give the movie an 8 out of 10. Good, but not the mind-blowing spank-fest I had my heart set on.
posted
Thanks to this movie I am emotionally devastated!
Well, OK, not really, but still. I mean, OK, so if it does well this weekend there will be sequels, but so what? Wash! Book!
Also, oh man, awesome.
(Though, to nitpick: Can anyone really erase all memory of a planet that appeared to be as developed as any in the Core? Or, actually, hang on. I guess all they said was that "terraforming didn't take," which I guess might mean the environment collapsed after the colonists had settled and the cities been built. And with the Reavers making it their homebase it's not like anyone would be in a hurry to go check. Still, in that case, wouldn't it be remembered as a great tragedy, albeit an ecological one that's conveniently no one's fault?)
I guess, all things considered, things are mostly better in the end than the were in the beginning. The fact that our heroes are confronted by a team of Alliance soldiers at the end, rather than yet another Reaver freakout, suggests that they won in the sky. Which makes sense; homicidal mania is only going to get you so far against a professional navy. But anyway, that seemed like a sizable chunk of the Reaver population, so that's good for folks. And the new leaders who come to power after the huge scandal might very well prove to be better than their predecessors.
Still, a downer, really.
Also I would have liked to have seen one of those skyscraperesque Alliance cruisers from the show. The Reaver ship from the pilot managed to make an appearance, after all; why not one of these? It could totally deploy gunships and kapow, bang!
Uh, after watching the film I kind of had some beer.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Oh yeah, and I wonder if the flashes on Earth (that was) at the beginning were meant to be more ships launching, or something more menacing, like nuclear detonations. There weren't very many of them, so I lean towards the former. (If you're going to have a nuclear war, why bother with half measures?)
Registered: Mar 1999
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
So, here I was hoping for some grand creepy reavelation that, like River, the Reavers were somehow tied to Firefly's version of the Psi-Corps conducting evil experiments on Potential-12 telepaths, and all I got was a lousy low-key story that 26th century Prozac either kills people (who took it voluntarily, even) or turns them into mental cannibals. Boo.
Registered: Nov 1999
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posted
That was pretty disappointing. OTOH, ghost town... Maybe?
If you look, and I'm not 100% certain, but I think the number of blasts corresponded exactly with the number of ships and their various vectors out of Earth.
So, I want to see it again. I'm not sure I loved it. There were a lot of things I did like. A lot. Some truly great scenes. Character interplay. But then there were some things that made me go "Hmmmmm".
Like Mr. Universe. Wasn't buying it. Deus Ex Machine planet. And while the 'twist' of the Alliance being somehow responsible for the Reavers seemed like it might be this huge thing, but it seemed kind of a disappointing origin. And didn't really make me feel any sympathy for those that got ended on their air-Prozac. And speaking of sympathic endings, was it just me or did Wash and Book kind of get bum wraps? AND I'm not sure I bought (or really even understood) Mal's "Do what I say or I'll shoot you, you jerks" speech on/at Haven. Like why it couldn't be a (an admittedly more schlocky), "Yeah, let's do it for Book. (besides we ain't got nowheres else we can go.)" thing. And where the fuck was Blue Sun? Hover-wagon chase? Why didn't they just jump off a cliff into Serenity's waiting hull while they were at it?
So much that was good though: I love: A) that Jayne wasn't just a total idiot wasted purely for comedic value and got to yell at the Captain and probably be right, B) Everyone was totally in on the Mal + Inara thing, C) Mal and Zoe shorthand "so...trap?" "Yeah, trap." is always awesome, D) Mal "Think she'll hold together?" Hooray!, E) Reavers are scary, F) River isn't useless, G) Bad guys who are badasses, but maybe might not be so terrible that they ain't human, G) Hover-wagon! H) Kaylee get's her man (And in a complicated procedure, Simon surgically removes his foot from his mouth and head from his ass. He is a great doctor after all.) I) Pretty space battle. Shiny, J) Mal just shooting bad guys, K) Body count, L) Fuck it, I'm stopping... There's a lot to love.
In the great balance? Well I think I want to watch it again. I didn't really take to the series at first. Now it's one of my favorite things ever. I wound up thinking there were a lot of things I felt had been done better in the series. I think maybe I went in with too high expectations. Maybe repeat viewings.
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
I was definitely expecting more of the series feel than ended up being there. It felt *almost* like a movie that had been written for people who hadn't seen the series.
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The thoughts of our friend who shall remain nameless:
Quoth The Lad "I saw it last night. I knew Book was going to die (simple plotting by my friend Aleta & me, we heard that Joss said "someone's going to die," plus I got the soundtrack when it streeted on Tuesday). So we saw it & went, "OK, there's our death."
And then..Wash.
It STILL hits me. Haunted my dreams, in fact. To quote Bucky from "Get Fuzzy," "You killed the funny."
Picked up that Mal was gonna lead the Reavers, figured River would become the new pilot--how handy is that? A pilot who knows what's going on before what's going on happens.
I liked that The Operative was left alive--a nice touch. And I've always like Chiwatel Ejiafor (I think that's how it's spelled) ever since I saw him in "Dirty Pretty Things." Good casting.
I need to drag another friend to it on Sunday, one who has never seen the show (despite our attempts to have her watch) & who whined about going last night. In the past 5 years, I've only seen 2 movies more than once: Gladiator (3 times) & Bend It Like Beckham (twice). This is worth paying $7.50 for again.
My favorite line from that? The opener: " In her review, Manohla Dargis in the New York Times compares Joss Whedon's Serenity with George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith. Serenity comes out ahead."
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I doubt it, myself. I have this nebulous notion about how the movie, while good, doesn't make up for the cancelling of the show, and how a good movie instead of a great TV show is a kind of melancholy pleasure. But I haven't worked out the details yet, beyond this vague sense that the whole structure of the 'verse is built for serial storytelling.
That's a doubt about the possibility of sequels, by the way, not about their desirability.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
A friend of mine said that the story that was told during the movie was slated to fill the whole of the third season. The origin of the Reavers and what not. So this does seem like Joss saying, "If I don't get to do anything else with these characters... this is what I wanted to do."
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